When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.

None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.

When anger rises, think of the consequences.

Buddhism teaches us not to try to run away from suffering. You have to confront suffering. You have to look deeply into the nature of suffering in order to recognize its cause, the making of the suffering.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

Live one day at a time emphasizing ethics rather than rules.

You don’t lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.

I’m very type-A, and many things in my life are about control and domination, but eating should be a submissive experience, where you let down your guard and enjoy the ride.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

The wisest hustler can suddenly fall for the worst tramp and lose all of his money on her. The hustler is aware of his own weaknesses and openings to con. This awareness is his edge.

There are three constants in life… change, choice and principles.

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.

One of the most important decisions you’ll ever make is choosing the kind of universe you exist in: is it helpful and supportive or hostile and unsupportive? Your answer to this question will make all the difference in terms of how you live your life and what kind of Divine assistance you attract.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Our words will either bring life and victory or death and destruction. If we want to be happy, we have to be serious about speaking words of life that line up with God’s Word.

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

People should not make me out to be like Jesus; I don’t walk on water.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of your attention.

Actors know what actors are insecure about – and they’re all insecure.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

If I feel anxious every time someone is staring at me, well, I can’t control what they stare at, but my reaction is, I’m just not going to go outside the house. I’m going to stay in and chill. And when I do go out, I understand what comes along with that.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life… I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.

Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

Sometimes I try to just sit at home and do something calmer and simpler and just be in my life. You know, not trying to solve a lot of things at once.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

You can’t talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different.

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

When the mind is empty, silent, when it is in a state of complete negation – which is not blankness, nor the opposite of being positive, but a totally different state in which all thought has ceased – only then is it possible for that which is unnameable to come into being.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Our brains are either our greatest assets or our greatest liabilities.

I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

Searching is half the fun: life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.

The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!